The Italy Now Podcast

Frescoes, algorithms & monsters, inside Venice's Palazzo Diedo

We step inside Palazzo Diedo in Cannaregio with curator Adriana Rispoli, where Berggruen Arts and Culture has staged Strange Rules, the first curatorial reflection on protocol art ever mounted in Italy. Beneath restored 18th-century frescoes, algorithms run underfoot. Adriana walks us through new commissions from Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, Trevor Paglen's 25-minute AI hypnosis piece, and the wider conversation behind the show. She explains why the new medium is the protocol, where the artist sits in a co-production with AI, and what Gramsci's monsters have to do with the algorithms shaping our lives. Running alongside the 61st Venice Biennale, it is a show about the strange rules of our technological epoch, and the people still trying to keep hold of the controls. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Sea, stone & vines, the rebirth of Aeolian wine

We climb to Tenuta di Castellaro, 350 metres above the Mediterranean, where founder Massimo Lentsch is rebuilding Aeolian viticulture vine by vine. He tells us how a volcanic archipelago once known for its wines came close to losing them altogether, and what it has taken to bring the vineyards back to life on this windblown stretch of rock and sea. It is the story of an estate, an archipelago, and a quiet act of restoration carried out one harvest at a time. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Sunsets, sulphur & silence, inside Vulcano's most discreet hotel

We meet Pierpaolo Tiretti on the Vulcanello promontory at Therasia Resort, Sea and Spa, the design-led Aeolian retreat that occupies a piece of Italian television history. The villa was once the hideaway of Mike Bongiorno, the man who effectively invented Italian TV, and his celebrity rolodex laid the groundwork for what is today one of the islands' most discreet hotels. Pierpaolo, himself from Ischia, runs the property for the Polito family, who began at Parco Maria in the late 1960s and arrived on Vulcano in 2001. He tells us about Michelin-starred dining on a volcano, the raw chaos of the sulphurous fanghi baths where heads bob in the mud as the sea bubbles nearby, and the season Michael Jordan dropped anchor in the bay. It is a story of an island, a family and the quiet conviction that the real luxury is time, space and a sunset that falls differently every day of the year. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Bread, voices & emotion. The family that gave Italy its voice

We meet Ilaria D'Uva in Venice, where she has just given a voice to the city's Naval Museum and where two million people a year already hear her words at the Duomo of Milan, the Pantheon, Pompeii and Assisi. She grew up, as she puts it, on bread and audio guides, the daughter of the man who created Italy's very first audio guide in 1959, after Florence said no and the future Pope Paul VI in Milan said yes. Ilaria tells us how one Florentine family came to hold the keys to so many of Italy's most iconic sites, why she now writes every narration herself as a piece of theatre set to original music, and how she uses AI all day long while remaining certain it can never reproduce the one thing her work lives on. Emotion. From a café on the island of San Giorgio to the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, and now the audio guide she is writing for Villa Adriana, where she has quietly fallen in love with the Emperor Hadrian, this is the story of how Italy finds the words to speak to the world, one voice at a time. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Five centuries, one square & 1.3 million lives: inside the Procuratie Vecchie

We step inside the Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco in Venice, a 500-year-old palace closed to the public for five centuries and reopened in 2022 after a complete restoration by David Chipperfield Architects. Emma Ursic, CEO of The Human Safety Net Foundation, tells us how Generali transformed this extraordinary space into a global home for social innovation, reaching more than 1.3 million vulnerable people across 25 countries since 2017. From a refugee turned Parisian barber giving back to his community, to free exhibitions, family workshops & very good Italian coffee, this is the story of a building, a foundation & a quietly radical idea: that the most famous square in the world should also be a place where people rise by lifting others. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.